Russia's Kostiantynivka Slog Slowest 'By Any Army In Any War of Last 100 Years'

The Russian attempt to take Kostiantynivka - which the Kremlin has already claimed accomplished several times - has now been deemed the slowest rate of advance by any army in any war of the past century. And in military terms, that is not considered a compliment.

Russian forces' attacks have been reduced from mechanized assaults, to small team infiltrations to, recently, individual soldiers burrowing into collapsed buildings in hopes of claiming 'gains' - before being discovered by Ukrainian units and then eliminated. Zhukov defeating the Nazi panzers at Kursk this is not. JL

Giorgio Provinciali reports in Medium:

The Russian advance on Kostiantynivka averages fifty meters a day — the slowest rate recorded by any army in any war of the past century. Hence, a paradox worth fixing on paper: an army that assaults a city eleven times, which its own supreme commander has declared conquered, produces, with every attack, an official denial. Since January, Russia’s leadership has claimed advances along the entire front at least once a month, in high-visibility briefings under the heading of cognitive warfare. The eleven assaults (reveal) at the operational level the truth is known, otherwise no one would order the taking of what is already possessed. The system manufactures the lie the leader demands, and the leader consumes the lie the system manufactures.

Late in the evening of July 3, Vladimir Putin appeared in uniform at a command post of the occupation forces. Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov reported to him that the Southern grouping had «liberated» Kostiantynivka, one of the principal defensive hubs of the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk–Kostiantynivka fortified belt, and in the same briefing certified full control of Luhansk oblast’. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov sealed the package: the city has been «completely taken». Putin spoke of a victory of «major strategic importance» and claimed 133 settlements captured since the start of 2026. The Defense Ministry circulated Telegram footage of soldiers waving flags among the ruins, and went so far as to offer a «humanitarian action» to return the bodies of Ukrainian defenders fallen in the «liberated» city.
The staging is complete: briefing, map, flag, crocodile mercy.

Ukraine’s General Staff denied the claim within hours. The operational picture at the Dzvin joint command center — the lines of contact returned by the integrated Delta system, the platform that fuses aerial, satellite, and human reconnaissance into a single real-time photograph of the battlefield — matches what we have been documenting for days: the town of Kostiantynivka remains under the full control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, units of the 19th Army Corps hold the city and its approaches, and counter-sabotage operations continue against the small infantry groups that have slipped inside.
To be precise: in these first days of July, the Russian army has mounted eleven assault attempts along the axis. All of them failed.

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A scarecrow used by Ukrainians in Dobropillia, just above Pokrovsk, Donetsk, Ukraine.

The independent numbers agree. The Institute for the Study of War called the announcement inconsistent with every piece of available evidence: in mid-June the Russian presence in the city ranged between 100 and 250 men, scattered in sabotage groups among Ukrainian positions, and as of June 23 the defenders outnumbered the infiltrators. In our most recent reports, we showed how those infiltrators were — up to one week ago — in the southern sector of Kostiantynivka, proving that the main logistic route (mainly one, plus other secondary workarounds) to the city was still running. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has calculated that the Russian advance on Kostiantynivka averages fifty meters a day — the slowest rate recorded by any army in any war of the past century. Hence, a paradox worth fixing on paper: an army that assaults a city eleven times, which its own supreme commander has declared conquered, produces, with every attack, an official denial signed by the sender.

History, for its part, prepared one detail with particular care. It was the Avtosteklo glassworks of Kostiantynivka that smelted, in the 1930s, the ruby glass of the stars still burning atop the Kremlin’s towers. The city that lit Moscow’s stars is now «conquered» by Moscow on a map that exists only in television studios.
Anyone who has worked in the Donbas has crossed Kostiantynivka a thousand times: the rail lines, the smokestacks, the road to Druzhkivka that smells of coal in winter. It holds — gutted, and Ukrainian.

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Our chevrons and flags are still here, in Donetsk. Road to Pokrovsk.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s answer to the Russian dictator’s claims therefore rests on solid ground. After his call with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Ukrainian president replied on X that Putin, on the eve of America’s Independence Day, «chose to lie to the world and to the President of the United States», and issued a challenge of disarming simplicity: if Kostiantynivka were truly in Russian hands, Putin would have no difficulty meeting him there to negotiate, at last, an end to this war. He will never cross the front line, Zelensky added, because reality differs sharply from his words. This is geography used as a polygraph — a test that costs nothing to whoever tells the truth and cannot be taken by whoever lies. The Kremlin passed it in its own fashion. Peskov countered by inviting Zelensky to present himself in Moscow instead, «because the capital of Russia is Moscow, not Kostiantynivka».

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Alla at the “star” before entering the Donetsk oblast’, Pokrovsk side — copyrighted photo 

Giorgio Provinciali

To this picture we add what reaches us from our contacts inside the territories of Ukraine that the Russian Federation illegally occupies. Another bridge on the Mariupol’–Donetsk route has been destroyed near the village of Kremenivka; a second has been hit, again in Donetsk oblast’, over the Malyi Kalchyk river in the Hranitne district; a third — a railway bridge — has collapsed under Ukrainian strikes over the Teple river near Nyzhnoteple, in Luhansk; a fourth transit node has been severed at Novoocheretuvate, in Donetsk once more. Additional Russian fuel depots have gone up at Melitopol’ and in the Kharkiv region, and at least three inside Russia’s Kursk oblast’. Between Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, in the last hours, at least five Russian drone-control centers have burned.
Conditions along the self-styled “Novorossiya highway” — the M14 running from Mariupol’ toward Melitopol’ — are terrifying enough that the occupiers themselves have renamed it the “road of death”.

History enjoys its symmetries. Novorossiya was Prince Grigory Potemkin’s invention, and his name survives in every European language as shorthand for painted facades erected to please a passing sovereign. Two and a half centuries later, the facades have migrated from the roadside to the map room. The sequence must be read alongside the televised announcement, because it passes judgment on it.
A real conquest presupposes arteries capable of feeding it: ammunition, fuel, rotations, evacuations. In the verifiable world, those arteries are giving way one by one. This war, as we have been writing for weeks, will be decided by Russia’s capacity to regenerate what it loses — and that capacity currently travels over bridges dangling into rivers.

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Alla reporting from Dobropillia, Donetsk, Ukraine

The first reading is the most linear: Putin knows the situation and lies, feeding with his own voice a propaganda the battlefield contradicts. The fingerprints of authorship are everywhere. The calendar, first: the late-evening meeting of July 3 was staged, in ISW’s assessment, to shape Western media coverage over the weekend, on the eve of America’s Fourth of July; four days later, on July 7–8 in Ankara, NATO members are due to ratify a $140 billion military-aid package covering 2026 and 2027. The cadence, next: since January, Russia’s military leadership has claimed advances along the entire front at least once a month, in high-visibility briefings that ISW files under the heading of cognitive warfare. The precedents, finally: in October, Putin insisted that Pokrovsk and Kupiansk were encircled, and the following weeks dismantled the claim; a few weeks ago, Kostiantynivka itself had already been pronounced doomed. The personal pedigree completes the record: «there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea» (2014, later admitted), «we have no intention of invading» (February 2022).

Gogol — a son of the Poltava region, as it happens — wrote the manual two centuries ago. Chichikov toured the provinces buying up serfs who existed only in the census registers, dead souls still listed as living assets, and leveraged the paper into credit and social standing. The Kremlin’s July ledger runs on the same accounting: settlements that figure as Russian conquests only in a briefing transcript, leveraged into negotiating credit in Washington and Ankara. The paper conquest has a precise function — to obtain at the table what the field denies, to convert fifty meters a day into an aura of inevitability for sale to weary Western capitals.

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The remains of a building along the road from Kostiantynivka to Dobropillia, Ukraine — copyrighted photo 

Giorgio Provinciali

The second reading is the more unsettling one: Putin lives inside a bubble of disinformation deep enough to have severed his contact with reality, and moves imaginary troops across maps the battlefield ignores. Here, too, the evidence exists, and it is recent. In late May, ISW analyzed a Russian Defense Ministry map dated April 9 that surfaced online thanks to Ukrainian cartographers: entire villages west of Orikhiv marked as taken, an imaginary front pushed kilometers beyond the real one.
The analysts’ conclusion was: the military command regularly shows Putin inflated maps to mask the slowdown of the offensive, and that falsified picture drives him toward ever more unrealistic negotiating demands. In recent days, overlays of the front “according to Putin” against the real one have begun circulating again, with results that are embarrassing to say the least — two geographies claiming to describe the same war and diverging by entire cities.

This is the vertical of the lie that Russian administrative culture has cultivated for centuries — vranyo, pokazukha, every link in the chain coloring the map for the benefit of the link above — the same machinery that in 2022 produced the FSB’s masterpiece of a Kyiv to be taken in three days. In this reading, Putin genuinely believes, and moves phantom battalions with an index finger on the map: an image European history keeps filed in a Berlin bunker in April 1945, where an army group that existed mostly on paper was forever about to counterattack.

The two hypotheses coexist and feed each other: the system manufactures the lie the leader demands, and the leader consumes the lie the system manufactures. The decisive question is who signs the production order. Our answer: Putin, knowingly.

First, the Kremlin’s blindness runs on a strategic timer. When reality presents the bill, Moscow reads it fluently — the withdrawal from Kyiv in 2022, the flight from Kharkiv, the “partial” mobilization, the Black Sea Fleet’s removal from Sevastopol’. A man capable of ordering real retreats distinguishes perfectly between true maps and painted ones; he selects which to exhibit according to the audience.
Second, the July 3 lie has a return address and a delivery date — Washington on the eve of its national holiday, Ankara four days later — and calendar coincidences, by the twelfth monthly repetition, stop being coincidences.
Third, the eleven assaults: at the operational level the truth is known, otherwise no one would order the taking of what is already possessed — and the map leaked in the spring proves that accurate cartography circulates in Russia, if someone was able to measure its distance from the truth precisely enough to release it.

The bubble, then, exists. And Putin is its architect, its first customer, and its most committed salesman: he consumes the merchandise he ordered and resells it to the West under the brand of inevitability.

On one point, for once, Peskov told the truth: the capital of Russia is Moscow. It is the capital of the lie as well. In Kostiantynivka, meanwhile, the Ukrainian flag flies.
The road to verify it exists. We’ve been showing it here for so long.